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Monday, October 01, 2012

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr (D-IL) plans on introducing a national voter registration law in the new Congress which is basically intended to get around most of the voter suppression laws passed by the Republicans in many states such as Florida. More...

The RNC has canceled all of its swing-state voter registration drives after the fallout from the calamity down in Florida.

For the better part of two years now, Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Republican Party have been scouring the state like a sheriff and his posse, hot on the trail of election bandits.

Turns out, our Republican gunslingers didn’t have far to look. The wily varmints corrupting Florida’s electoral process have been working right under their noses.

(snip)

After the story broke last week, roiling through the newspapers, political blogs and cable television, the Florida Republican Party fired the outfit. So did the state Republican Party organizations in North Carolina, Colorado and Virginia. And finally the Republican National Committee, which had paid the firm $2.9 million to work its magic in swing states, announced that it was severing its relationship with Strategic Allied Consulting. The Florida party bosses also filed a formal election fraud complaint against its own vendor.

Page two of the article also has some juicy snark worth reading if you enjoy a good laugh when it is points out that after months of trying to weed out noncitizens from the Florida voter rolls, the state has found "198 suspect voters out of 11,446,540 registered statewide." Actually the total, according to the Florida Division of Elections website is 11,583,367. That number includes 4,173,177 Republicans and 4,627,929 Democrats, which means there are currently 454,752 more Democrats than Republicans registered in Florida. So if Rick Scott's desire to decrease that Democratic advantage, he failed miserably while wasting tax payer dollars on the project. Rick Scott has also made it a priority to increase Republican registrations in the state. Hungrycoyote

So just how bad is the voter suppression in Florida? Well, Ari Berman at The Nation has done a little research on the subject and has traced the Republican suppression efforts as far back as 2000.

You aren’t surprised, are you?

In a deeply sardonic twist, Republicans committed the only voter registration fraud that has occurred since the law was overturned. “It’s kind of ironic that the dead people they accused Acorn of registering are now being done by the RPOF [Republican Party of Florida],” Paul Lux, the Republican supervisor of elections in Okaloosa County, told NBC News.

And, unlike with ACORN, Strategic Allied Consulting didn’t alert authorities to the voter registration fraud—that was done by local election officials. Prosecutors are now investigating the group for criminal misconduct. (The case hasn’t put an end to GOP hypocrisy about voter fraud, however. Last week the attorney general of Texas invoked ACORN to justify similar restrictions on voter registration drives in his state, even though no charges were ever filed against the group.) Maybe in 2013 the Florida legislature should pass legislation specially preventing Republicans from running voter registration drives.

Here’s why this scandal matters: the Florida GOP committed voter registration fraud while undermining the right to vote for everyone else—particularly minority voters, who have been historically disenfranchised in the state and are key supporters of Barack Obama and Florida Democrats. The common thread between these different voter suppression efforts has been to make it more difficult for minority voters to cast a ballot.